It is well known that the quality of food is improved when it has been properly stirred or mixed during preparation. Stirring and mixing promotes even heating and cooking so that the finished product is consistently and thoroughly prepared. This is true whether the food is rice, oatmeal, meat, or popcorn. However, it is also known that the need to mix or stir food while it is being cooked is a time consuming, tiresome, and often tedious aspect of food preparation. Various attempts have been made to obviate or minimize the need for manual stirring of food while it is being cooked. These attempts include use a vibrating device to impart motion to the cooking system which causes relative movement between the system and the food being cooked as well as within the food itself. For example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. Heisei 11-253309 describes a rice cooker that includes a vibrating part. The vibrating part imparts vibration to an inner pot that is removable from the rice cooker, and which holds the water and rice intended to be cooked. The cooker includes a heating part that may heat the inner pot by induction. As another example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,997,018 discloses an electric griddle with a vibrating device attached to it to cause the cooking surface of the griddle to vibrate.
Previous attempts to use a vibrating device to assist in food preparation have had limited success for a variety of reasons. Because of their poor implementation, such attempts—including those disclosed in Heisei 11-253309 and the '018 patent—have been of limited usefulness in modern kitchens.
What is needed is an improved cooking system that will fully utilize the effectiveness of a vibrating device for assisting in the preparation of food.
The preparation of popcorn requires particular attention. In order to prepare a sufficient quantity of popped kernels that are uniformly cooked, the even application of heat to all of the kernels is imperative. Otherwise, some kernels pop earlier than others and become burned while the later-popping kernels continue to be heated. On the other hand, uneven heating can leave numerous kernels unpopped or only partially popped.
Many previous attempts have been made to engineer an efficient way to prepare high quality popcorn. For example, the well known Jiffy Pop® brand combines popcorn kernels and oil in a disposable aluminum pan with an expandable aluminum foil top. The Jiffy Pop® unit is heated on an electric range while the consumer continuously oscillates the unit, causing the kernels to move and mix in the pan. One obvious disadvantage of this method is the nearly constant attention that the consumer must pay to the task of shaking the disposable pan across the heat source.
Another example is the use of a microwave oven to heat a paper package containing kernels and oil. This method has well-known problems, including wildly uneven heating of the kernels resulting in burned popcorn and many kernels remaining unpopped. The overall flavor of popcorn prepared in the microwave is also well-known to be below average.
Thus, there is also a need for a reliable system to make high quality popcorn without requiring all of the attention of the consumer.